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Empathy and the Other: Difference, Connection, and the Teaching of Writing focuses on the theoretical basis for empathy as a pedagogical concern, adding to important conversations happening in writing studies about how to foster empathetic understanding and practices for teachers and students. It offers ways for higher education classrooms to become sites for the cultivation of a critical form of empathy that can help address the most important challenges of our time.

Drawing on the study of empathy in rhetorical theory and related fields, teacher-scholars from a variety of institutions and backgrounds offer pedagogical rationales and approaches for fostering empathetic, inclusive, and antiracist pedagogies centered around five key themes related to empathetic teaching: difference, citizenship, storytelling, assessment, and process. A reflective and critical approach to empathetic teaching—as presented by the authors in this collection—can begin to address forces of social division, particularly in the ways we read and write about others. Teaching grounded in empathetic principles can offer students ways of relating to one another across cultural, religious, class, ethnic, political, and ideological differences.

Empathy and the Other is a companion volume to Enacting Empathy: Stories and Strategies from the Writing Classroom, which features vignettes and praxis pieces focused on classroom experiences and reflections on teaching empathy. The two collections may stand alone or be read together and are of great interest to writing teachers and graduate students invested in social justice in the classroom.

Featuring vignettes and praxis pieces focused on classroom experiences and reflections on teaching empathy, Enacting Empathy: Stories and Strategies from the Composition Classroom provides inspiration and consideration of how and why teachers might adopt an emphasis on empathy. Contributors locate empathy in the particulars of writing assignments, classroom discussions, responses to students, interpretations of texts, and connections with communities.

The challenges and means of understanding one another—as we encounter one another in words, images, and texts—are a central focus of the writing classroom. Teaching for and about empathy has become only more important as we have experienced increased social division, greater recognition and attention to identity, and an emphasis on attending to personal experiences and stories as part of larger efforts to support social justice. With its possibilities for critical reflection and revision, writing is a key tool for developing empathy. Empathy likewise can make us more present, accountable, and socially engaged in our writing. This collection explores how empathy might best be put into practice in the composition classroom, featuring teaching resources, assignment designs, and reflections on empathy and teaching writing for diverse institutional contexts.

The first edited collection in at least thirty years to present strategies for teaching empathy in composition classrooms, Enacting Empathy is a companion volume to Empathy and the Other: Difference, Connection, and the Teaching of Writing, which focuses on the theoretical basis for empathy as a pedagogical concern. The two volumes may stand alone or be read together and are of great interest to writing teachers and graduate students invested in social justice in the classroom.